"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..."

Doom, id Software's December 1993 follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D, was a quantum leap forward in video game design, and an even bigger step forward in video game violence. It follows the story of an unnamed Space Marine posted to the Union Aerospace Corporation's base on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. When teleportation experiments between Phobos and Deimos cause Deimos to vanish and a horde of grotesque monsters to invade the Phobos base, our hero is the only human left alive between the two bases. He fights his way through the creatures in search of a way off Phobos, finding himself transported instead to Deimos, now residing in the creatures' homeland, which turns out to be none other than Hell itself.

The release of Doom was met with unprecedented controversy regarding its content. Not only was there a very high amount of frank Satanic imagery (albeit all cast in a highly negative light), it was filled with graphic depictions of zombies and monsters being blown apart, eviscerated, shot to pieces and generally disintegrating into piles of gore. People who play video games, however, would have referred to all of the above as "Lots of fun for the whole family!" Gameplay was extremely gung-ho — the makers noted that the manual could have simply read, "If it moves, kill it" — and encouraged the player to attack with reckless abandon, using such implements as chainsaws, chainguns and the originalBFG, a massive weapon which could reduce an entire room of monsters to viscera. Even the player's own face, shown near the health counter as in Wolfenstein, became battered and bloodied with damage.

Also, whereas Wolfenstein's fortresses all had identical lighting, Doom featured variable lighting, including flickering and glowing lights, adding to the game's atmosphere. The game also introduced vertical height, rather than the horizontal-only format of Wolfenstein. The game also introduced the idea of multi-player death matches and co-op missions in a modern FPS, with its developers fully expecting Doom to be the biggest cause of decreased productivity in IT companies the world over in 1993. And they were right. It became such a smash hit that it is often credited with boosting the sales of Microsoft Windows 95, with even Bill Gates crediting it for popularizing the OS, thanks in part to his efforts to make sure there was a Win95-compatible version of the game.

Doom built upon the formula established by Wolfenstein 3D and expanded upon it, becoming a Trope Codifier to the entire First Person Shooter genre - to the point where through most of the 90s, until true 3D games really took off and they started emerging from Doom's shadow, such games were often referred to as "Doom clones" as opposed to "first-person shooters". Doom's weapon selection would form the template from which many other games would base their own weapon on. The deathmatch would become a staple of multiplayer FPS to this day. Even Doom's basic premise would become a trope. Doom was also incredibly moddable, giving birth to one of the first big video game modding communities (which first operated on BBS before migrating to the internet), which still thrives and exists to this day. It's no hyperbole to say that Doom is one of the most influential games of all time.

Followed by Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994), which saw the demons invading Earth, and was also a huge financial and critical success. In between Doom II and 3, Final Doom was released the same month as Quake. It was identical to Doom II, but came with two different Expansion Packs: TNT: Evilution, created by the third party modding group TeamTNT (originally intended to be free until id struck a publishing deal with them); and The Plutonia Experiment, made by two members of the group in four months' time, generally considered the hardest of the official packs. Final Doom also included a 32-bit Direct X version of the Doom engine, making it the only way to play classic Doom on many modern 64-bit Windows machines, besides virtual machines like DOSBox or the many source ports.

A decade later, Doom 3 (2004) was released. The third installment, which was a reboot rather than a sequel, breaks with the first two significantly, with a dark, oppressive tone much more akin to a Survival Horror than anything. It was this incarnation on which the movie was based. This was followed by the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, set two years later. The game was remastered in HD, compiling the first two games with it, in addition to adding another eight levels to its campaign. Furthermore, you can actually wield a flashlight and a gun at the same time. This compilation, titled the BFG Edition, was released in October 2012.

In 2016, id Software released another game simply titledDoom, a re-railing of the franchise, known to most fans as Doom 4. Doom used to be known as Doom 4 when it was revealed in 2007, but the game went through Troubled Production, so id decided to revive it. The reboot is more of an Actionized Sequel compared to Doom 3, featuring faster gameplay and more emphasis on shooting rather than horror. It also purposely calls back to the gameplay of the first two titles by avoiding modern FPS mechanics like emphasis on cover, weapon reloading, and limited weapon loadouts.

Doom has been ported to many, many console systems over the years. The PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions combined levels from both Doom and Doom II alongside a large number of unique missions; more original levels were released in a sequel entitled Final Doom. There was also Doom 64 for the Nintendo 64, which was an entirely new entry in the series and probably more of a Doom 3 than the actual Doom 3 was (it was released years before, ran on a modified version of the original engine and continued the story of the first two games). Doom's source code has been released, and, at this point, almost anything with a CPU in it — many cameras and music players, some watches, several appliances, even a graphing calculator has been shown to run it for about half a minute before crashing — has had a version of Doom released for it. The game used a creepy and distinctive sound effect for doors opening, which has been re-used in many Speculative Fiction series for all sorts of things.

Also, a comic for Doomwas made at the height of the dark age. It's hilarious, probably intentionally so. We hope. As mentioned above, there was also a movie for it, which is of debatable quality, but maintains the satanic imagery and violence.

There was also a series of novelizations by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. Four in all, the first two, Knee Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth, were based on the first and second games, respectively. The final two, Infernal Sky and Endgame, went their own direction with the plot. These novels have a small cult following. There are also two novels based on Doom 3 by Matthew Costello, who also wrote that game's script.

As for other products in the franchise, there are two cell phone-based RPGs, an iOS-based Rail Shooter, and a board game with expansion pack. For fan-games, see FanWorks.Doom.

This video-game provides examples of:

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#-H

100% Completion: The classic games have percentage counters for how many monsters were killed, items collected, and secrets found in each level. Some source ports will reward you with a "Perfect" rating if you get 100% in all three categories. Most 100% speedrun categories (eg: UV-Max) focus only on 100% monsters and secrets.

Abandoned Mine: "The Abandoned Mines" in Doom II. Granted, it doesn't look much like actual mines (then again, no level in the classic Doom games looks like anything) and it's supposed to be located in Hell, but it does have areas that look like giant underground excavated caverns which probably inspired the level design of Doom 3.

Actionized Sequel: While Doom I is fast-paced, it is generally willing to have scary moments as shown with several fights through a maze filled with Pinkies and imps while the lights flicker on and off. The second game goes for the "EXPLOSION TIME" brand of fun people associate with the series. The third slows things right down and adds in more Survival Horror elements to the mix.

It is also inverted before Doom 3 showed up: in between Doom II and Doom 3, there was Final Doom and Doom 64. Final Doom was a Doom II style death orgy that had two whole level packs. Doom 64, however, is a horror game with just this spooky droning soundtrack.

The 2016 reboot of the series is this to Doom 3, using the aesthetics of both the UAC tech and the demons from that game, but making it much more in line with the original games.

Also, the novelizations are the only time "Doomguy" is given a proper name (for those wondering, it's Flynn "Fly" Taggart for the classic series novels, and John Kane for the Doom 3 novels). Word of God is that the games' protagonist is deliberately not given a name because it's supposed to be you, the player.

Always Accurate Attack: The arch-vile's attack will always hit the target unless it leaves the line of sight before it finishes. Partial invisibility won't cause it to miss, but does affect the knockback direction.

Always Chaotic Evil: The demons all have nothing but malicious intent towards everyone and everything around them - even other demons, if one of them hits another. The only enemy that can attack other enemies without repercussion is an Archvile.

Ammunition Backpack: As a power-up. Not only does it give you one of each "small ammo pack" (one pistol clip, four shotgun shells, one rocket, and one 20-volt energy cell), if it's your first, it doubles your ammo-carrying capacity (you can carry 400 bullets and 100 shells instead of 200 and 50, and so on).

And I Must Scream: Some crushing floors in the first two games only crush, they never release. If you let yourself be smashed by these and happen to have enough health, you'll remain trapped alive in concrete. Have a nice stay if it's multiplayer and no one else can find and kill you to release you. Thankfully, a rather rare bug.

And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Xbox Live Arcade port of Doom II offers two Avatar Awards. You'll get a Doom t-shirt for finishing the regular game, while completing the XBLA exclusive episode "No Rest For the Living" will net you a full Marine costume.

The Artifact: The computer screens in the star textures contain the text "Tei Tenga" left over from Tom Hall's Doom Bible where the game was planned to be set. After Tom was voted off the island, the game moved to Mars' moons.

Artifact of Doom: The Unmaker from Doom 64, apparently carved from demons' souls.

Artificial Stupidity: It doesn't matter if a fellow monster is in the way, all monsters will start attacking upon sight of the player, and if their attack connects with a fellow monster, they'll turn on each other. Players who are out of ammo will quickly learn to start triggering in-fights. The term "monster infighting" was coined to describe this (especially when other games began featuring the same thing). There are some levels in Doom II in particular where the only way for the player to survive is to trigger in-fighting to either reduce enemy numbers or get other monsters to take out or weaken one of the big bads like the Cyberdemon; one level, "Gotcha!", is even titled such because its main setpiece is an arena with both a Cyberdemon and a Spider Mastermind in it, which is incredibly easy to set them to fight each other.

Artistic License – Astronomy: The original Doom takes place on the moons Phobos and Deimos, which are depicted as having Earthlike gravity and atmospheres. In reality Phobos and Deimos are tiny moonlets no more than 20 kilometers across, have gravity so low you could probably jump into space off them, and have no atmosphere (and even if you could artificially generate one, the gravity of the moons would not be enough to keep it from floating away).

Ascended Glitch: Oh, wow. Lots. Most of them have been used and abused for speedruns and map-making.

Similarly, the shimmery "hall of mirrors" effect that occurs when a texture is missing has been adopted by some level designers to create deep water. It will still glitch if your view is below the water level, however.

Also the "voodoo doll" bug, which can be easily created by placing two different start points for a single player. Clever mapmakers have used this bug to create traps which can teleport a player into another copy of himself, resulting in a recursive Tele-Frag (MAP30 of TNT: Evilution is an example). Voodoo dolls under triggered crushing ceilings can also be used to cause player deaths wherever the mapmaker wants; for example, simulating bottomless pits by triggering the ceiling if a player falls into one.

Because the first two Doom games aren't true 3D, a rocket's splash damage isn't a sphere as might be expected; it's a cylinder of infinite height. Likewise, actors are considered to be infinitely-tall as far as collision is concerned, allowing you to hit enemies you can't even see over the edge of a pit (or for enemies at the top of a wall to scratch you if you're standing next to the wall). These bits of questionable behavior are what allows you to damage Doom II's final boss.

It is possible to mess with sectors and sector references to create an "invisible staircase" effect, which was first demonstrated by a map called UAC_Dead.wad. This in fact abuses the same glitch as deep water effect above, just the water doesn't need some of the set-up needed for bridges.

If you trigger an action to move the floor up, but the target height is lower than current height, then the floor will move instantly (and the other way round, if the floor should be moving down but the target height is higher, it will also move instantly). Combined with the "invisible bridge" effect above, this allows for a fake 3D bridge which can be passed over and under, by moving the floor depending on where the player is. This is used in some custom maps. It is also used heavily in Doom 64 to create bridges and tunnels.

In Doom II, the Pain Elemental will spawn up to three Lost Souls when it's destroyed, in a triangular formation. However, if you let it live, it'll continually spawn them. Get a Pain Elemental into a fight with another monster, and it'll spit the things like missiles. The manual referenced this, saying that "killing him is almost as bad as letting him live".

In the Doom II RPG for mobile devices, the Spider Mastermind will explode into three Arachnotrons.

The episode title itself ("Thy Flesh Consumed") and that of its final mission ("Unto the Cruel") are taken from the two verses of Proverbs 5, verses 9 and 11, respectively.note And before you ask, don't worry, the secret level "Fear" is in the Bible too.

A-Team Firing: Normally, monsters fire directly at the player, allowing the player to dodge. If you collect the Partial Invisibility power-up, enemies will fire wildly in your general direction (and miss more often than not). Ironically, this can actually make it harder to avoid getting hit sometimes if you pick up a bad habit of dodging projectiles or if there are a lot of enemies in an area, because you can accidentally dodge into one of the stray ones; most custom maps use the sphere for this purpose, by forcing you to collect one before entering a large battle with a lot of demons.

Attract Mode: Doom and Doom II (and their kin) play a demo if left on the title screen for a second or two, but the original revisions of Final Doom would crash because its WADs don't include a 4th demo recording.

Auto-Save: Many source ports, such as ZDoom or Zandronum, auto-save whenever the player enters a new level, whilst also having the option of manual saves.

Awesome, but Impractical: The Berserk pack. It brings you back up to 100 health if you're anywhere below that, which is a godsend if you're down to 10 or 20 health. On top of that, as its name implies, it boosts the power of your punches for the rest of the level to the point you can gib zombies and imps with one or two hits. But why would you risk rushing into a horde of enemies to punch them to death one at a time while the others tear you to shreds? It's mostly good for ammo-crunch situations.

Body Horror: The original Doom games have plenty of walls in the hell levels appearing to be made of human flesh, faces, or piles of corpses.

Bonus Boss: The secret level in the map pack Doom 2 the Way id Did mimics the Commander Keen series instead of Wolfenstein 3D. If you can find the super secret exit in it, however, you can actually fight the Dopefish itself in the Well of Wishes.

Boring Return Journey: The end of Doom II has your character taking the long trek back home after practically destroying Hell.

Boss Arena Idiocy: The final boss of Doom II is a giant invulnerable face in the wall of an arena which spawns endless monsters from the hole in its forehead; its only weak spot. You can shoot rockets into the hole to kill it, but such a task would be impossible if not for the arena providing a convenient elevator that reaches the height of the brain hole.

However (even though ports supporting mouse aim do indeed ruin the level), this level is still not all that easy to win: While the elevator rises to about the height of said hole, firing a rocket when the player has already reached the top is rather useless since the rocket will hit a spot slightly above the hole and do no damage whatsoever. Therefore shooting the rockets has to be timed precisely. Moreover the process has to be be repeated at least three timesnote as the THING which needs to be destroyed in order to beat the level is only affected by the rockets' blast radius, which is a randomized value, which can render the level a bit frustrating, especially on higher skill levels.

Swastikas in E1M4 were changed in later versions to allow the game to be sold in Germany. Also, German versions of Doom II do not contain the Wolfenstein-inspired levels 31 or 32.

The Game Boy Advance ports of Doom I and II had all the in-game blood turned green - which had the side effect of turning objects such as shotgun shells, pipes on walls and other items green as well, since they merely changed the base palette. Ironically, the SNES port of Doom retained most of the original game's red-blooded violence, with only the Satanic symbols being censored.

The BFG Edition and XBLA version of Doom IIcompletely purges the secret Wolfenstein 3D levels of every Wolfenstein element: No Swastikas nor Hitler portraits, the SS guards are replaced by zombiemen squads, the unique map music themes have been replaced by the theme of MAP05 for both maps and the levels have been renamed ("Wolfenstein" to "IDKFA" and "Grosse" to "Keen") The red crosses on health packs were also removed, replaced with little red-and-white pills because of complaints by the International Red Cross about use of their symbol. Purists were not happy.

The first final boss - the Spider Mastermind - was essentially a giant brain carried by a robot body. Her children in Doom II are the Arachnotrons, which are basically smaller versions with plasma guns.

Doom 2's final boss is the Icon of Sin, a giant skeletal goat face with an exposed brain as a weak point. It is only vulnerable to rockets, however.

You think that is bad? The Plutonia 2 equivalent, unsubtly named "Go 4 It", is the same again... on steroids. Plutonia Revisited ups the ante again with "Have @ It".

Doom 64's "Hectic" is a very tiny level with a small handful of enemies, but is packed to the brim with dirty tricks and One-Hit Kill traps (the first room of the level is full of power-ups that will kill you if you try to get them, except for two you can only get in a very specific way.)

Canon Welding: The cell phone RPGs are in the same continuity as Wolfenstein RPG, which features the "Harbinger of Doom" as the final boss. The Harbinger gets his arm and leg blown off and swears to avenge himself on B.J.'s descendants, becoming the Cyberdemon.

Clothing Damage: As seen in the page image, Doomguy's uniform is heavily damaged in most official artwork. Amusingly, this led to some players thinking that his armor was issued with an abdominal cutout.

The id Anthology not only compiles of all the classic Doom games, it also includes Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, and the entire Commander Keen series across four CD-ROMs. This collection also added some bug fixes to TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment, and this version serves as the basis of the GOG.com release.

The Depths of Doom Trilogy is a PC compilation that included Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Master Levels for Doom II across three CDs, along with the shareware version of Heretic, an amateur set of levels called Maximum Doom, and DWANGO version 2.02 for multiplayer at the time.

Doom: Collector's Edition for PC includes Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom on a single disc. It also allows players to play the classic Doom games without using virtual machines such as DOSBox or source ports.

The BFG Edition includes Doom and Doom II, albeit the Xbox LIVE Arcade ports that have various alterations including the censored versions of the Wolfenstein 3D secret levels in Doom II... on the plus side, it gives PC players a chance to officially play the Doom II XBLA-exclusive episode "No Rest For the Living". In November 2012, the PlayStation 3 received another compilation called Doom Classic Complete, which includes the original two games plus "No Rest for the Living", as well as Master Levels for Doom II and Final Doom, marking the first time in a long while that TNT Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment have been seen on home consoles.

The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: A combination of Fake Difficulty and bastard map-designers, it does not matter how carefully a player clears rooms and watches dark corners as there will always be tiny, function-less, hidden, and effectively-invisible closets containing idle monsters whose sole purpose is to surprise the player from behind.

And, to a lesser extent (at least in the base game), there's the fact that due to the way hitscan enemies (i.e., riflemen, shotgunners, etc) are programmed, they will always hit you unless you get behind cover (if they don't miss due to spread), even if they're on the other side of the map from you. While this doesn't matter much in the enclosed spaces of the base game, in some custom levels favoring open spaces, this can get very annoying.

Container Maze: Some parts of E2M2: Containment Area in the first Doom is basically a maze of crates with UAC supplies.

Continuity Reboot: Happened twice. Doom 3 and its expansion Resurrection of Evil does not descend from the events of Doom and Hell on Earth and the 2016 game is another reboot that does not follow on from 3.

Contractual Boss Immunity: Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds are immune to splash damage. They only take damage from the rocket itself, not the explosion.

Covers Always Lie: The cover of the first game shows the Marine wielding what seems to be some kind of sub machine gun or small assault rifle, despite the game having no such weapon. It did, however, exist in the alpha — but that weapon was turned into a chaingun during development.

It eventually made its way into Doom 3, albeit with a redesigned appearance.

Unless, of course, if you count multiplayer. But if that's the case, maybe that other Marine is not exactly rushing to his friend's aid...

Critical Existence Failure: Played straight for all enemies. Cyberdemons, Spider Masterminds, and Arachnotrons are more justified with the former launching rockets and the latter two being mostly robotic.

Damage Discrimination: With the exception of bullets, monsters are immune to their own kind's projectile attacks.

Although they weren't bosses (except for the 'Bruiser Brothers' at the end of the first episode) Barons of Hell were considered to have hit points WELL out of proportion with their actual threat level. This led to the introduction of Hell Knights in Doom II, which were about as dangerous (their plasma orbs and claw attacks did the same damage), but only half as tough.

Dancing Mook Credits: The ending of Doom II let you watch the moving, action, and death sequences of all the enemies (and yourself!) in a neverending (looping) parade of slaughter and screams, which killed and advanced to the next enemy on a keypress. Same for the Doom 64 version.

Darker and Edgier: Where Doom had most of the game with a soundtrack of rock and metal, Doom II opted for slower, darker, mood setting music. The PlayStation and Saturn versions of Doom and Doom 64 went even further, introducing darker music, and remodeling/revoicing the demons to appear far more intimidating. Some parts of Doom 64 are downright scary.

Dead-End Room: the exit chamber of MAP12, though it doesn't prevent you going forward, it only prevents you re-entering the rest of the map. See also And I Must Scream above.

Deadly Dodging: A major tactic is to slip between enemies (or at least ensure one is between your attacker). If one enemy damages another with a ranged attack or barrel explosion, this results in monster in-fighting (generally resulting in one of the enemies dying.)

Death by Cameo: In Doom II, John Romero's head is the Big Bad (more accurately, the Big Bad's hit-box, and it can only be found using the "idclip" cheat and walking INTO the boss' brain). And the body of the designer of level 24 of the fan-made Doom II level pack Requiem can be seen upside down on a cross in that level.

Dolled-Up Installment: The original name for Doom 64 was "The Absolution" but id Software and Midway decided to brand it with the "Doom" name to drive sales, despite taking a considerably different tone and style to previous Doom installments. This isn't the strictest example as id had creative and supervisory input on the development of the game and the game itself runs on the Doom engine but remains the only Doom game not internally developed at id. The original name lives on via the game's final level ("The Absolution").

Do Not Run with a Gun: The player is the only entity in the original games able to fire and move at the same time. Some mods change this.

Doom II's Level 9, "The Pit", is famous for not having quite enough ammo to destroy all the monsters, even on a full playthrough. Those wanting 100% completion usually had to resort to using the fists or chainsaw for good chunks of the level.

"Hell Beneath", the first level of the new episode from Ultimate Doom, is similarly low on ammo. Even with the level's hidden rocket launcher, killing everything is difficult.

Dual Boss: The two Barons of Hell at the end of the first episode of the original game. They get a repeat in Doom 3.

Dummied Out: A couple of things that were supposed to happen in the original games were effectively dummied out by coding errors:

The "Ouch Face" was an expression for the status bar head in the middle of the HUD that was supposed to show if the player received more than 20 damage at a time. In practice, the code was written in such a way that it would only appear if the player took damage and gained at least 20 health during the same tic, something that was extremely unlikely to occur without the player actually trying to make it happen. The "Ouch face" is fixed in many source ports (such as, Boom, ZDoom)

The message "picked up a medikit that you REALLY need!" was supposed to appear if the player had less than 25% health when they picked the kit up. Unfortunately, the code checks the player's health after applying the health change for picking up the medkit, meaning it is physically impossible for the player to have less than 26% health; as a result, the message is never displayed at all (this is also fixed in various source ports).

There was also the BFG. The classic BFG is probably the most complicated and illogical weapon ever put in an FPS, largely due to it holding over all of the mechanics from a scrapped alpha version of itself. This "billion fireballs gun" fired a ragged burst of 40 projectiles and was scrapped because it "looked like Christmas" and slowed the game to a crawl. The Doom BFG might appear to just fire a big ball that does splash damage, but it actually does this:

After a delay of just under a second, the BFG fires the green energy ball.

On impact, the projectile deals a large amount of direct (not splash) damage to whatever it hit.

The BFG's invisible mechanics come into play now. The weapon fires a spread of 40 hitscan "traces" (or "rays") evenly distributed across a 90-degree arc pointing in the direction the BFG ball was fired in, from the player's current position, with each ray dealing 15d8 damage. Coupled with the average damage of impact being 450 damage, the average damage of the BFG (with very little deviation, due to the 601 dice rolls) was 3150 damage. This is 150 more health than the final boss of Doom has.

Most people are not aware that you can kill someone with the BFG with your back to them after firing it in a totally different room.

Initially, an Easter Egg game of Asteroids was to be accessible from the computer map, but this was almost entirely cut. (Some references to deleted files remained in code.)

Another piece of code that was dummied out was intended to allow for doors to slide sideways. This was meant to be used in Doom II's secret levels which are based on Wolfenstein 3D levels. The code was commented out when id decided to scale down the amount of Wolf 3-D assets in the WAD file. Therefore the doors in the secret levels still open just like those found throughout the rest of the game (unlike the original Wolfenstein 3D doors that opened sideways).

Since Doom and Doom 2 practically use the same executable, any Doom 2 content is technically "dummied out" in the original Doom (with the original one forcefully disabling Doom II specific content in custom maps.) The lack of such protection caused problems in betas v1.5 and v1.6, where the super shotgun could be obtained by an all weapons cheat but either crashed the game or prevented you from selecting the regular shotgun.

"Fuck you, pussy! Get the fuck out!""You quit and I'll jizz in your cystholes!""If you leave, I'll make the Lord drink my jizz!""Hey, Ron! Can we say "fuck" in the game?"Explanation "Ron" refers to Ron Chaimowitz, then head of GT Interactive."I'd leave: this is just more monsters and levels. What a load.""Suck it down, asshole! You're a fucking wimp!""Don't quit now! We're still spending your money!""This is no message! Page intentionally left blank."

Worth noting is that according to John Romero, these messages were jokes made by the development team and were never meant to be in the final release.

In the Playstation port of Doom, a press release for the game shown that alongside the new Nightmare Spectre, Nightmare Imps were planned to be included in the game, with a screenshot of one ingame. Nightmare Imps were removed from the released game for unknown reasons, though the capabilities for them still exist in the game's coding (as Nightmare Spectres were created by a special "nightmare" flag that when applied to a monster, made them translucent with subtractive blending while doubling their HP, which could technically be applied to any monster in the game). Nightmare Imps would later be implemented in Doom 64, though were implemented differently by having their speed and attacks be twice as fast instead of having their HP doubled.

According to Aubrey Hodges, the person who created the sounds and music used for PSX Doom, the Archvile was planned to be in PSX Doom, and he even created new sounds for the Archvile, before the Archvile was removed from the game when it proved too memory-intensive for the Playstation's RAM while the developers were unwilling to compromise the Archvile to include it. All instances of the Archvile in the included Doom 2 maps were replaced with a hanging meat hook texture.

In the Playstation port of Final Doom, the Spider Mastermind doesn't appear anywhere in any of the included levels, though she's still included in the endgame's cast call and all her assets still exist within the game's data files.

Earn Your Happy Ending: After destroying Mars, venturing home to Earth to find that it's been taken over, saving the entirety of the human race, then venturing to hell and BLOWING HELL UP Doomguy deserves this whole-heartedly.

Endless Corridor: Although the original Doom actually helped break first-person gaming out of the "straight corridor" mode, there are still many locations in the first game and its sequels where the endless corridor effect is invoked.

Enemy Roll Call: Hell on Earth shows each enemy along with the name in the ending, but some of the names differ from those in the manual.

Enemy Summoner: Pain Elementals and the Icon of Sin in Doom II; Archviles in Doom 3.

Epic Fail: What did the UAC want to do? Make teleporters. Result? Hell invades Earth.

Equipment-Based Progression: In the classic games, the player gets stronger as they find better and powerful weapons, and finding your first ammo backpack permanently gives you double the ammo capacity. In Doom 64, your Unmaker has Artifacts that makes it a much more powerful weapon. Although the 2016 DOOM has stat upgrades for your suit, the weapons still have the spotlight and even exhibit the trope themselves with the mod system.

Escaped from Hell: The Marine dies at the end of the first episode. Three episodes later, he finds a portal back to Earth as the ending text says he was "too tough for Hell to contain".

Evil Versus Evil: You can set up scenarios like this quite easily, and some demon types, such as Cacodemons and Barons of Hell, actively despise each other.

Evolutionary Ret Con: Practically every memorable demon in the series was completely redesigned for Doom 3. Most of these redesigns made the demons appear much scarier and more formidable opponents for the player. The original imp, for example, was a large, brown creature with spikes on its shoulders that would slowly advance towards the player while hurling fireballs at them. The new imp is a slimmer grey creature with no spikes and ten eyes on its head that is capable of climbing walls and has incredible jumping ability that allows it to clear the distance across an entire room in a single leap and generally attacks with a much more aggressive style.

Evolving Weapon: The Unmaker in Doom 64. When you first get it, it fires only a single laser and isn't anything special. If you manage to collect all three Demon Artifacts hidden throughout the game, though, it shoots multiple lasers in a spread pattern and is even more powerful than the BFG 9000 (to the point that only about a half-dozen shots are needed to kill the Final Boss.

Fragile Speedster: Doom 64's Nightmare Imps move fast and have one of the fastest projectiles among the enemies, but it still only has the very low 60 HP a normal Imp has.

Game-Breaking Bug: The PlayStation version has a TEXTURE CACHE OVERFLOW bug that crashes the game due to overloading the system's memory (especially on first-generation PlayStations) when a very large number of enemies are present.

Another PS1 bug that broke the game for anyone attempting to finish a level with 100% kills would sometimes occur if a monster was impacted by splash damage or was simply shot at when too close to a wall. The monster (this tended to happen most with the Lost Soul floating skull or any of the zombie soldiers) could be sent into the wall. The monster would still be visible and still in fact attempt to shoot or attack the player, but would otherwise be unkillable (and unable to harm the player). Adding to the surreal nature of the bug, the monsters would then start moving off into the distance until they effectively vanished from view (but could still be seen using the show monsters map cheat). This glitch appears to be unique to Doom proper and not the PS1-exclusive Final Doom sequel.

Map 31: "Pharaoh", of TNT: Evilution, has a game-breaking bug in that the yellow key is missing (actually tagged as "multiplayer only"). As a result, you cannot complete the map unless you do a particularly difficult jump, then press a concealed switch, that is not obvious unless you've seen it performed by someone else or opened the map in a level editor, thus you'll most likely find yourself lost and confused with no means of progression. Though a patch is available, it isn't integrated into most Final Doom releases, apart from one version of the id Anthology and the GOG.com version.

Game Mod: Possibly 60 percent or so of Doom's appeal today, aside from playing the vanilla game on source ports. It's got one of the most wildly varied modding communities out there, and some of the higher quality mods can make Doom look utterly unrecognizable compared to its first release. Lots of IWADs and total conversions for the original Doom games are still being produced, even twenty-plus years after the release of the first game. Word of God states this is by design, taking note of the map making efforts in their predecessor series Wolfenstein 3D and desiring to make custom content creation more accessible (as well as to ease internal development), the game is inherently modular and can easily have components swapped in and out with fanmade assets. Furthermore the engine source code was open-sourced in 1999, not only permitting porting the game to just about anything with a CPU, controls, and a display but giving an entirely new depth of game modding potential that allows for deep-level modification of the engine to completely reforge it.

Batman Doom: Besides sounding awesome, it was a great technical breakthrough in the early Doom days.

The Extreme Weapons Pack for Doom II, due to it's intentionally-crappy weapons, can be used for a Self-Imposed Challenge (so long as you don't use either the toothbrush, or the Game Boy, which are the best weapons in the mod). Among its "extreme weapons" include a pistol that Doomguy cleans (a VERY long and unskippable animation that precludes weapon switching) every time you stop shooting it, an old, rusted shotgun that takes several seconds to finally fire and which has a jammed pump, a chaingun with realistic recoil (that is, you go flying backwards like you're strapped to a jet engine...), and the Chuper Chotgun, with a "chuper" broken right barrel (causing you to spin wildly when you fire it), and to top the cake off Doomguy struggles to put the shells in properly.

Then there's "Tech Gone Bad", a fleshed out remake of the final stage of the first game's first episode. Notable because it's made by John Romero himself, one of the original creators of Doom.

There's also the Nuts mods, which have you take on an army of enemies that would make the Dynasty Warriors devs nod in approval. The problem with it is that these mods are extremely demanding because of the massive number of enemies (in fact, PCs that can run the 2016 reboot at max settings get brought to their knees by these mods).

Some mods actually make it to the mainstream media because of the Rule of Fun:

A mod made at the height of the 2010 World Cup, gives the Doomguy a most fearsome weapon: a vuvuzela. The expression on his face is what sells it.

It's not the first of its kind. One previous mod added in a stereo. Sounds pathetic? Well, not even demons can withstand a Rick Roll, apparently.

True Capitalist Doom (Based off of True Capitalist Radio) replaces the protagonist with Ghost, shotguns with "crushing cans", the BFG with a Hadoken, The CyberDemon to play the "FU Texas" song, and so forth. Ghost himself said he liked the mod.

Version 6 also adds six of the player classes from Team Fortress 2, the Postal Dude, of all people, and even the Infected were brought into the fray, along with a Portal Run mode, and Monster Mayhem, which has you dealing with enemies spawning in every-so-often in addition to those already in the maps.

Brutal Doom is Exactly What It Says on the Tin — your weapons have all received a power upgrade (and your wimpy peashooter has been replaced with an assault rifle that can fire on full automatic and is capable of scoring headshots on enemies), the action is much Bloodier and Gorier than the original game with many enemies now capable of being smeared all over the vicinity, the Berserk Pack now gives you the option of doing Fatalities on enemies, and your enemies have received an upgrade in both stats and AI (for example, in vanilla Doom, the zombie soldiers are pathetically weak, dumb, and fire very inaccurate single shots. In Brutal Doom, they've got burst-firing assault rifles, are a good deal faster, and their AI is no longer nearly as braindead. They can even sometimes combat-roll out of your attacks and throw grenades.) as well and are fully capable of ripping you to shreds, making gameplay a lot tougher than the original.

Yo dawg, I hear you like mods, so we'll mod your mod. That's the basic M.O. for Project Brutality; a mod for Brutal Doom (that eventually became a standalone mod) that takes Brutal Doom as a base, and expands upon it with stuff such as new weapons, voice clips for Doomguy, and so on.

Reelism is a not-at-all-serious score-centric round-based survival mod in which an RNG slot machine activates at the beginning of each round to change up the game, altering special effects (such as flight, exploding enemies, or other gameplay-related stuff), weapon spawns (or lack thereof) and enemy types. Things tend to get very frantic, and that's before the boss that appears in the sixth round; as a time-waster that can be played in short bursts, it's a lot of fun.

Demonsteele turns Doom into a sort of first-person Devil May Cry, featuring letter-graded combo scores, energy-gauged special moves, new weaponry, and a blend of gun and sword combat.

Contra Doom puts Contra's gameplay into Doom's environments... right down to the iconic infinite ammo weapons like the Spread Gun, a score, the Smart Bombs from Contra III: The Alien Wars, weapon upgrades from Super Contra (Arcade) and Contra 4, Video Game Lives, and of course, a One-Hit-Point Wonder player. Due to the last point, hitscan enemies were changed to fire projectiles instead.

Doom for Doom recreates weapons, enemies, and gameplay elements from the 2016 reboot and adapted them into the classic Doom formula, resulting in a retro-styled demake of the former. It also features some customizable options from the ability to use multiplayer-exclusive weapons such as the Static Rifle and Lightning Gun in the single-player campaign, enable or disable Glory Kills, and swap between the original classic Doom enemies or their 2016 counterparts. It has a spiritual successor from one of the lead creators in the form of Doom 4: Death Foretold, which streamlines many aspects of Doom for Doom and features player upgrades as item drops.

Smooth Doom overhauls many of the game's animations and effects to make them more smooth in motion while adding new visual tweaks yet remains mostly faithful to the classic Doom gameplay.

Gameplay and Story Segregation: The Mother Demon in Doom 64 has the power to resurrect fallen demons, making them stronger than before. You fight it at the end of the game after wiping out a small army of demons, and it never tries to revive any of them.

Gatling Good: The Chaingun. It's been a series staple and can mow down most enemies in seconds. The only time it becomes ineffective is against bosses. Despite its threatening appearance, though, its fire rate and behavior is more akin to an assault rifle; in Strife (another Doom-engine game released a few years later), the weapon is even redrawn into a rifle, and behaves convincingly enough.

Glass Cannon: Lost Souls in Doom 64; they only have a measly 50 HP, which is even less than an Imp's. However, they're very aggressive and will quickly get in your face to attack repeatedly until stunned or killed, causing them to easily rack up damage quickly on an unsuspecting player, especially in the groups they're usually encountered in.

Pinky Demons and Spectres on Nightmare difficulty move at twice the speed, as well as attack at twice the speed, giving them the ability to attack very quickly with their bite that does up to 40 damage per hit. However, they still have their low 150 HP, allowing them to be killed fairly quickly by anything but the Pistol.

Former humans of any kind in Brutal Doom. Zombie soldiers can hit you from long range, and are usually annoyingly good at whittling down your health, but a quick rifle burst or shotgun blast will floor them. Shotgun zombies will rip into your health, but are still easy to gun down, and chaingunners (especially in those vanilla-designed, Chaingun Guy-heavy wads like Plutonia) will absolutely tear you apart, yet will fall like wet tissue paper when you respond in kind.

In Doom II, the Chaingunners and Revenants are this; the former only having marginally more health than other former humans, but able to really put the hurt on you and even other monsters with a rapid hitscan attack that can't be dodged, while Revenants have relatively low health for a higher tier demon (they have 300 HP, while everything else above a Pinky has at least 400), but are one of the fastest monsters in and shoot homing rockets at you that deal up to 80 damage, and pummel you quickly to pulp up close.

The Marine himself is one; he moves incredibly faster than every enemy in the game and can easily outrun their non-hitscan attacks, while his weaponry is far more powerful than what the demons possess (for example, the aforementioned Revenant rocket is one of the most dangerous attacks any enemy possesses, yet it is a less effective and weaker attack than the Doom Guy's simple Shotgun, and outside the Spider Mastermind and Cyberdemon, enemies that possess a weapon the Doom Guy has have a strictly inferior version- example being the three-pellet-shooting shotguns the zombie sergeants tote, compared to your seven-pellet shotgun. However, the Marine only has 100 HP at base (even less than the aforementioned Pinky), and at max health and armor has the equivalent of 400 HP (which most higher demons exceed).

Gorn: One of the games of the 90's, alongside the likes of Mortal Kombat, that created the moral panic about violence in video games for a reason. The original alone had gory death animations for some of the enemies, like Barons of Hell splitting in half to show their entrails and spinal cord, excess damage to weaker enemies (and the player!) turns them into red slop on the floor, and the environments were often decked out in corpses and gore the further you got into the games.

And true to that, Doom (2016) is aiming for this with seeming inspiration from Brutal Doom, especially so thanks to the Glory Kills. Like punching a zombie's head off with your fist, tearing a Hellknight in half by the waist with a chainsaw, or the player getting their arms ripped off by a Revenant before being beaten to death with one said limb.

Guide Dang It!: Some of the secret areas can reach this level. The Containment Area in Episode 2, for example, not only has a secret room within a secret room, but there's a secret passage within that secret room leading to another part of the stage, and there's another secret room within that secret passage. Those who are used to more linear, modern FPS games will also sometimes find difficulty in navigating most Doom maps, as they tend to include repeatedly moving through areas to acquire keycards and open locked doors.

Finding the exit to the secret level "Hectic" in the first level of Doom 64 is perhaps the biggest example of such in the series. In the first level, upon blowing up all the barrels in the level, a wall concealing a teleporter will open up in an already secret area, for a very brief few seconds before permanently closing for the rest of the level (which means a player will have no chance to get to the secret exit unless they save the very first barrel in the level near the secret exit for last, let alone knowing about it in the first place). There's absolutely no indication that blowing up the barrels will do something (nor are barrels ever used as a trigger for something in any other Doom or level of Doom 64), and the only hint ingame that the secret exists as a seemingly inconsequential small blood stain on the floor in front of the wall concealing the secret exit. Hectic is this hidden for good reason however, as the level puts the player up against incredibly unfair situations with minimal resources and has a load of instant death traps, while rewarding a player who manages to clear the level with access to the "cheats" menu, which grants the player things such as god mode, unlimited ammo, and the ability to warp to any level (including three secret "for fun" levels that cannot be accessed by normal gameplay).

Guilt-Based Gaming: When the player attempts to exit, a humorous quit message is shown, mockingly trying to convince the player to stay and play some more.

Harder Than Hard: The aptly-named "Nightmare!" difficulty, the only setting where monsters you've killed will respawn several seconds after they die. The monsters also shoot more rapidly than on all the other difficulty levels. And cheat codes are disabled. The only good thing about it is that ammo pickups contain double the normal levels of ammo... and you will need it all.

"Nightmare!" difficulty wasn't even included in the earliest releases of the game. It's very hard in single player mode, but it's fine for co-op multiplayer games, which let the players respawn, too.

Amped up in the 2016 remake is an even MORE DIFFICULT "Ultra-NIGHTMARE!!" difficulty. Take the entirety of what makes the original "NIGHTMARE!" difficulty so brutal, and add You Only Live Once to it. If you die, you return straight back to where you bust out of the sarcophagus..note This mode is only unlocked after completing the fifth chapter of the game.

The "player sighted" roar of the Barons of Hell is rather pants-filling.

The animalistic roar of a Cyberdemon ("RAAAAAARGH!!") and the booming footsteps (*KATHUNK-KATHUNK-KATHUNK*) echoing across a level are the stuff of nightmares.

A Revenant's screech ("AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!") and the sound the missile launch (*HIRO-EH*) followed by the active noises (*HAAAOOOOW*) can also be unsettling.

Arachnotrons don't really make noises themselves, but their walker platforms continually make a mechanical stomping as they patrol the area. It's terrifying knowing a group are stalking you, especially in maps like "Dead Simple" in Doom 2. Their plasma guns are also very powerful, and hearing the distinct "PEW" of one firing means you have a split second to react before the fast-moving projectiles fry you.

Because most enemies' encounter noises trigger upon firing a weapon in an open area, especially in the Final Doom expansion packs, there is a good chance that the sound of your pistol can bring about a chorus of waking Cyberdemons, Archviles, Revenants, and Spider Masterminds. All. At. Once.

Hell on Earth: How the original game ends. After literally going through Hell and returning to Earth, you find that Hell has followed you home. And true to form, Doom II: Hell on Earth is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Heroic Mime: Doomguy (with the exception of the Comic) doesn't seem to have a whole lot to say. This may be because there is nobody to talk to.

In Doom II, he talks to several people through comlinks, albeit offscreen.

Hero-Tracking Failure: Enemies tend to miss their shots when the player is circle-strafing around them, unless the enemies are able to surround the player. Averted with hitscan enemies like any former humans, as they will face the player and fire an unavoidable tracer shot/spread/barrage. Though that's subverted in that all former humans have relatively mediocre accuracy, and might not hit you at all anyway.

Hitler Ate Sugar: Moral Guardians got a lot of mileage out of the fact that the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were fans of the game. Harris was even making his own maps, and while there's been many rumours that he made maps with the layout of the high school, no Columbine maps have ever been found.

Hitscan: All bullet-based weapons and the invisible part of the BFG's fire cycle in the first two games.

In some cases (particularly Nightmare difficulty) this can make zombiemen even worse than their tougher imp counterparts. At least with imps you get a chance to dodge the projectiles that get shot at you.

Horns of Villainy: Many of the demons have horns, with the Cacodemons sporting several pairs and the Cyberdemon's being especially enormous.

Hyperspace Arsenal: Where the hell is the Doomguy keeping all of those weapons? Not to mention the ammo; at the start of the game the player can hold 50 full-sized rockets, in addition to other ammunition and weapons. When you later find a backpack, you double your ammo carrying capacity. A hundred explosive warheads are rather impossible to fit inside a military grade backpack, and that is not accounting for your twenty kilos of bullets and five full boxes of buckshot.

Indecisive Medium: The film adaptation has a suspicious amount of scenes shot in "first person".

Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Central to much of the level design of the first two games, which did not feature any kind of jumping. Later source ports added jumping, allowing players to skip huge swaths of the classic levels by simply hopping over these obstacles.

Taken to the extreme in Ballistyx from TNT: Evilution — the exit linedef is on a chest-height altar that's supposed to be lowered into the ground near the end of the level, meaning you can finish a normally six minute or so map in under two seconds by simply jumping up onto it. Dead Simple in Doom II likewise has the exit switch on a waist-high platform, allowing you to finish it in three seconds just by jumping.

Interquel: The Ultimate Doom, which was published after Doom II, contained a fourth episode for the original Doom, which occurred before the events of Doom II.

Kaizo Trap: Halls of the Damned has a fake exit switch that instead dumps you into a room with a Cacodemon and a ton of Zombiemen.

Kill Enemies to Open: Doom II's level "Dead Simple" (MAP07) starts the player inside a cloister with four mancubi, each one on a raised platform. Once all four mancubi fall, the outer walls lower to reveal a fleet of arachnotrons in the outer perimeter.

Doom's level "Phobos Anomaly" (E1M8) requires you to kill both of the Barons of Hell to lower the star shaped walls in their arena, which reveals a large courtyard with the teleporter to the exit.

Doom's level "Against Thee Wickedly" (E4M6) also has a particular nasty example where a Cyberdemon shows up near the barred off exit. The only way to raise said bars is to actually kill the Cyberdemon, and the space you have to fight him is generally very small, so good luck.

King Mook: The Spider Mastermind to the Arachnotrons in the original games.

Kubrick Stare: In Parts 1 & 2, as Doomguy takes more damage, his head dips lower and lower, producing this effect.

Level-Map Display: You can always look at a map of what you've explored so far. If you find a computer map, you can see the entire level.

Except in E1M8. Here the computer map is given to you right from the beginning. The level is named "Phobos Anomaly", but the map does not show the anomaly itself...

Lightning Bruiser: Cyberdemons are one of the fastest enemies in the game both movement and attack/projectile speed wise, while having significantly more HP than every other enemy in the game with a massive 4000 alongside a low pain chance and complete immunity to splash damage, and their rockets are just as strong as a player's, meaning they can kill you in one-two direct hits and easily lay waste to every other enemy in the game except the Spiderdemon in close quarters.

Archviles are the fastest moving enemies in the game outside a charging Lost Soul and Demons/Spectres on nightmare difficulty, while having the fourth highest HP in the game with 700 alongside the lowest pain chance of any monster, and an attack that will always do a very high 80 damage.

Episode 3 ("Inferno!") and its levels are named after Part 1 of Dante's The Divine Comedy.

As noted above, Episode 4 ("Thy Flesh Consumed") and its levels are named after Biblical passages.

Living Structure Monster: The Icon of Sin, a wall with a picture of a demon on it, the Final Boss in Doom 2, attacks you by summoning his various demonic flunkies to fight you. Its weakpoint is on a point on his "head".

Logic Bomb: In early versions of the classic games, monsters can fight each other if they hit each other. But if they somehow hit themselves (typically via barrels, as detailed in this article), they will tear themselves apart.

Magikarp Power: The Unmaker in Doom 64 goes through this. When you first pick it up, it only fires a single laser at a slow rate. Finding the first Artifact makes it shoot faster, the second gives it a Spread Shot effect, and the third further ups the effect, effectively reaching beam spamming levels.

Make Way for the New Villains: For the first two episodes of Doom, the Barons of Hell are easily the biggest, baddest and toughest demons you go up against, and starting with their introduction at the end of episode 1, you fear them and know they're a force to be reckoned with. Then you reach "Tower of Babel", the final map of episode 2, and find yourself in a room with four Barons... all dead, horribly mutilated and strung up on the four walls you can open. If these were the biggest, scariest enemies in the game, what in the world did this to them? Then you meet the Cyberdemon. While Barons do still show up later in the games, this moment makes it abundantly clear that they're hardly the nastiest things you'll have to face.

Marathon Level: Going by the "par time" at the end of the levels, E2M4 and M6 are 6 and 4 minutes respectively, while it usually never goes to 3 minutes, and Doom II has 7 minutes in Maps 17 and 28. Most maps on Episode 3: Inferno are really long and convoluted as well.

Meaningful Name: The third episode of Doom (Inferno!) draws its name and its episode names from The Divine Comedy. The fourth episode (Thy Flesh Consumed), and its levels except the secret level (Fear), draw their names from Bible quotations.

Mission-Pack Sequel: Doom II to its forerunner. Same engine, only a single new weapon (the double-barreled "Super Shotgun"), and a handful of new enemy types. However, Tropes Are Not Bad because Doom was a great game and a slew of new maps is not unwelcome. That being said, some of the level design choices in the back half of Doom II don't exactly hold up as well as you'd hope...

In turn, Final Doom is this to Doom II — both were originally full 32-map mods for Doom II before they were picked up to be published by id.

Missing Secret: In Doom 64, the 24th level "No Escape" is the penultimate level in the game, and the final level, "The Absolution", is the 25th. However, if the player looks at the automap on The Absolution, they'll noticed The Absolution is listed as "Map 28", seemingly implying the player missed out on a series of three secret levels between No Escape and The Absolution. However, there is no secret exit on No Escape, and the player will always advance to The Absolution upon clearing No Escape. Now Maps 25-27 do exist, but they're very small "fun levels" that just put the player up against a Cyberdemon and some Mancubi/Arachnotrons, that can only be accessed by codes or by finding the impossible-to-find-without-a-guide secret level Hectic and then clearing all its extremely difficult challenges to get access to the "cheats menu", then using the cheats menu to warp to the "fun levels" inexplicably slotted in maps 25-27.

In the PlayStation port of Final Doom, the Spider Mastermind is in the game's ending cast call, despite not appearing anywhere in the game's levels. This has led players unaware of her nonexistence to fruitlessly search everywhere in the game for her.

Monster Closet: The Trope Codifier, along with Teleporting Keycard Squad. Often times rooms would be just a pedestal with an item on them, but taking the item opens up all the walls to reveal nasties. If you see a key or very good item, expect the baddies to pop out as soon as you get it.

Mook Maker: the final boss of Doom II spews out various enemies, which can telefrag you if you're not careful. And then there's the Pain Elementals, who chuck Lost Souls at you.

Multi-Mook Melee: Many of the custom "slaughter maps" and Nintendo Hard megawads are mostly made up of these, with some fights in the infamous Deus Vult map (maps 1-4 are parts of the main map, which is map05) or the ever fun "Go 2 It", which involves a brawl against several Arachnotrons and Cyberdemons. The infamous nuts.wad has so many enemies note 10617, to be exact that on badly coded ports framerate slows down to a crawl, even if using a computer made 20 years after the original game. However, serious maps with that many monsters have also been made.

Nerf: In the PlayStation port of Doom, Revenants were nerfed considerably, having the speed of their movement and punches/missiles reduced by about half. Though in some compensation, they only fire homing missiles instead of mixing them in with straight shots.

The player's Plasma Rifle also had its firing speed reduced by about half here, though it remained useful and able to reliably stunlock anything but a Baron and the bosses to death. This nerf was retained in Doom 64, which ended up making the Plasma Rifle completely obsoleted by the Unmaker.

For an idea of how much HP that actually is for those enemies, Cyberdemons only have 4,000. (and spider mastermind only having 3,000. This IS low enough for a point blank BFG-9000 blast to kill her in one shot, BTW.)

No Fair Cheating: Using "-turbo" prints a chat message from time to time. In the original, and most ports of it, cheat codes are disabled entirely in Nightmare difficulty.

No OSHA Compliance: Rivers of toxic ooze run though the middle of a high-tech military base, for no particular reason. The strategy guide for Doom II practically calls this trope out by name: (in regard to the Radiation Suit) "OSHA may not like it, but to get the job done, you're going to have to handle some toxic waste every now and then."

Novelization: Four books based off Doom and Doom II (with the first two being actual novelisations of the game's storyline, such as it was). And two more based off Doom 3.

The Only One: You play the lone space marine who was left on guard duty at the ship, now the only thing standing against the hordes of hell.

Our Zombies Are Different: The zombies in this game are very humanlike, to the point where they wield guns instead of shambling with their bare mitts like your typical living dead.

Outrun the Fireball: Level 23 in Doom II, "Barrels O' Fun" has this with groups of exploding barrels and enemies that can set them off.

Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Doom was one of the few video games in the early 90s that demonstrates that 2D sprites can spill lots of blood shot and killed, and some enemies can be gibbed when killed by high-powered weapons.

Password Save: In the PlayStation and Saturn versions of Doom and in Doom 64, although Doom 64 also supports a save function whereas the PlayStation and Saturn versions do not.

Psychotic Smirk: The marine is rather passionate about battling Hell's hordes as, after a new weapon is picked up, the protagonist grins devilishly at prospect of blowing away demonic forces with it.

The best part is when he makes the grin while his face is covered in blood.

Punny Name: Several songs on the soundtrack, including but not limited to Kitchen Ace (And Taking Names) and Nobody Told Me About Id.

Bye Bye American Pie was both a play on the song name "American Pie" and one of the level designers of Doom II, American McGee.

Quad Damage: The Berserk Pack multiplies fist damage by ten times. For the rest of the level. You can gib weak mooks by punching them.

There's a (hopefully) intentionally crappy mod out there called All Hell is Breaking Loose! Among such things as flying demons that shout "Fuck you!" and flip you off when they die, the zombie soldier gib animation is replaced with them burning to death. This means that you can set someone on fire with a punch.

R-Z

Rated M for Manly: Admit it, you've always wanted to kill demons with your bare hands. The sequel takes it Up to 11 when you blow up Hell.

Reassigned to Antarctica: The Doomguy in the original two games assaulted a superior officer who ordered him to fire on civilians. Rather than a court martial that would make them look like monsters if the reason for it got out, they decided to assign him to Mars — a barren rock whose only notable features were scientific outposts on its moons, and which was never expected to see any sort of action.

In Doom 64, not only is Hell's sky red, but in some levels it's on fire.

Reformulated Game: Doom 64. The redone levels and enemies, darker graphics and horror-inspired soundtrack gave the game a much different ambiance than the original game, even if the gameplay is for the most part still the same.

Road Runner PC: The Doom marine was intentionally faster than normal monster movement, and could be made faster with a command line option. What wasn't intentional was strafe-running (+40% speed boost), and wall hugging (massive speed boost).

Roaring Rampage of Revenge: At the end of episode 4 in The Ultimate Doom it is revealed that the Doomguy's reason for killing all the demons was to avenge his pet rabbit Daisy, who's head you see on a spike at the end of episode 3

Rocket Jump: Ur-Example in first-person shooters. There's no vertical lift, but it does toss you around. One secret was specifically designed to require a rocketjump... though it can be reached just by straferunning.

Try playing a map pack that requires a limit-removing source port and you're bound to get one of these. With the removal of the vanilla engine's notoriously strict mapping limitations, one of which closes the game entirely if exceeded, map creators became free to add extensive details to the architecture as well as huge sprawling open areas in their maps, resulting in stunning scenery if executed properly.

The Back to Saturn X series has gorgeous maps and impressive detail... and now realise that it's designed to run under the vanilla engine, within its mapping limits as noted above. The trickery used to make bridges appear 3D as well texture cheats to create the illusion of sloped or curved arches are incredible.

The first several levels of Doom II are pretty standard difficulty. Things really ratchet up once you hit "Dead Simple" and "Tricks and Traps", when large groups of high-tier enemies appear very frequently.

Final Doom (The Plutonia Experiment and TNT: Evilution) takes Doom II and ratchets it Up to 11.

invoked Among the console Dooms, Doom 64 is considerably more difficult than the thematically similar PlayStation ports despite having the utterly broken Unmaker, and lacking Revenants, Chaingunners, and Spider Mastermind. The increased difficulty comes from larger and more complicated levels, not having limitations in enemy variety per level (so unlike Playstation Doom, Doom 64 can throw all it strongest monsters at you in a single level), Lost Souls and Pain Elementals being made significantly more dangerous (the latter now being a bonafide Demonic Spider used liberally throughout the game), plasma cells being significantly more scarce (so the player has to be really stingy with their use of the Unmaker and BFG to ensure they have ammunition when they really need them), a plethora of death traps to quickly kill a unsuspecting player, arena-type levels having a special flag set that prevents monster infighting from happening (so you can't rely on monster infighting to thin out the the large swarms of monsters you fight in arena levels), a new final boss that's significantly harder than the Spider Mastermind, and just generally putting the player into more dangerous situations in general.

Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: A vital survival technique in the classic Dooms, especially in levels with more monsters than you can shake a boomstick at. If an enemy damages another enemy in any way, they will engage each other to the death unless angered by the player or a different foe. Infighting has some rules to it, such as monsters of the same type cannot damage each other with their projectiles unless they use a hitscan weapon, and when a monster is damaged, they'll have a randomised "targeting threshold", i.e. a period of time where they'll ignore damage from the player/other monsters while engaging the player/another monster they were initially damaged by.

Some of the levels even outright encouraged the player to exploit through design, some examples of which:

The first area of E3M1 didn't have enough ammunition to kill all the Beef Gates. It was punch them to death, or get them fighting each other. Since Imps and Cacodemons both had ranged attacks, getting them to hit each other was relatively easy. Then the retaliation started...

E2M9, the secret level in the second episode, had two rooms. One with Barons of Hell, the other with Cacodemons. Again, the trick was to get them fighting each other, then maneuver for survival. (Lampshaded in the novels.)

Map 8 of Doom II has a room with a Cyberdemon looking at you, and several Barons of Hell looking at the Cyberdemon. The trick? Don't fire a shot - the Cyberdemon will shoot at the Barons trying to get to you, and they'll retaliate. Wait until one group disposes of the other, then take down what's left. No wonder it's called Tricks And Traps.

Map 20 of Doom II contained a large antechamber with a Cyberdemon and a Spider Mastermind on two opposite platforms. No prizes for guessing the easiest way to waste them both. The level is appropriately named 'Gotcha!' This sequence exists mostly to try and answer the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny-style question of who would win. It's usually the Cyberdemon, but the Spider Mastermind's odds improve in inverse proportion to the distance between them. Gotcha! is just on the Cyberdemon's side, although Spidey does sometimes win. In some rare cases, they can end up killing each other.

Some of the demons have different infighting rules regarding them:

Lost Souls behave differently with in-fighting; they will make at most one attack when damaged (but can still exchange blows), and then resume attacks on the player.

While the game treats Barons of Hell and Hell Knights as different enemies, they have a hard-coded immunity to each others' projectiles, meaning they cannot infight without the aid of a barrel. This exception was removed in Doom 64, where they'll infight as normal.

Pain Elementals can target other monsters upon being damaged, but since their "projectile" are the Lost Souls they summon, monsters will retaliate against the Lost Souls they spawn rather than the Pain Elemental itself, meaning a monster will never engage a Pain Elemental. This was sorta-fixed in Doom 64; while monsters will still retaliate against the Lost Souls, they can now retaliate against a Pain Elemental if the Pain Elemental hits them with their new melee attack.

Archviles can engage other monsters as normal, but monsters are coded to never retaliate back against Archviles. Archviles additionally do not have a targeting threshold, meaning they will always instantly switch targets upon being damaged, even in the middle of their attack.

In some levels of Doom 64, mainly arena-type levels where you have to kill a large crowd of monsters in a smallish contained area to advance, a special flag is set that prevents monsters from retaliating against each other, preventing the player from being able to cheese these levels by having the monsters all kill each other.

Shareware: One of the most well known examples, Doom is probably the one title above all others which destroyed forever the "shareware is shareware because it's nowhere near good enough to sell at retail" myth. It was the first shareware product ever to be reviewed in the main pages of British PC Format magazine, instead of being relegated to the shareware section.

Doom II did not receive a shareware release, on the other hand. This was because, according to John Carmack, many people who downloaded the shareware episode Doom and beat it mistakenly considered themselves to have "beaten Doom" when they beat the demo.

Also because shareware was essentially a distribution method: download the (longer than average) demo, and if you like it, mail order the full version. Doom II was conceived as a retail product from the start, so all of that was unnecessary. And then Id decided to rerelease Doom at retail, as well...

Carmack has said in a 20th-anniversary interview that shareware was actually not such a great fit for Doom. Not because any problem with the strategy itself, but because the game was such an obvious generational leap forward in game technology at the time, it literally sold itself, without need of any marketing gimmicks.

Shoot the Medic First: The Archvile in Doom II can revive fallen foes, so killing this guy first is essential. However, he can also deal out a ton of damage with his line-of-sight attack. In ZDoom, it is possible to create enemies that can resurrect fallen foes via Decorate. Again, death for these guys should be top priority.

First, after defeating the Barons of Hell in the final level of the first episode, the only way out is through the teleporter... which takes you to Hell, where you're immediately overwhelmed by monsters and die (the coding in that room ends the level once you reach 11 HP or lower). The debriefing text really drives it home: "Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base, you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you? Where's your fat reward and ticket home? What the Hell is this? It's not supposed to end this way!"

And of course, the end of episode three. The Space Marine escapes from Hell and returns to Earth... only to find that the demons he had been fighting have already invaded. Cue the sequel.

Short-Range Shotgun: The original pump-action shotgun has a modest spread that will allow a good amount of its 7 pellets to hit at long distances, to where it can even be used as an effective sniping weapon in a pinch. The double-barreled shotgun from Doom II however plays this trope completely straight and was probably the Trope Maker; it shoots 20 pellets, that altogether will deal damage equivalent to a direct hit from a rocket, but its spread is huge and will deal vastly reduced damage at farther than arm's reach against anything that isn't a large target, while being absolutely pitiful against long-distanced targets. The sheer power and great ammo efficiency of it, combined with the player's tremendous movement that allows them to safely weave in for close-ranged shots, makes the Super Shotgun extremely useful to the point that it's generally the default weapon to use among higher-level players.

On the source port side, ZDoom has the developer's console cheat "anubis". Typing it in and pressing enter results in every monster in the game fleeing at the sight of you. Why? Because the message displayed when you hit enter is QUAKE WITH FEAR. Typing "anubis" again and hitting enter deactivates the fear effect with the message "No more Ogre Armor".

In the film, Dwayne Johnson actually had to fight to keep the "BFG" reference. There's also Pinky (who gets chainsawed), a Hellknight, and Reaper saying "Hell on Earth".

Speedrun: These games developed one of the earliest online speedrunning fanbases.

Splash Damage: The always venerable rocket launcher, along with the classic Exploding Barrels. BFG, the biggest gun in the game, does not deal blast damage in the traditional sense, though; it instead fires a cone of invisible beams (from the player, not the projectile) when the main projectile hits anything.

The final boss of Doom II, and by extension, most monster spawner based final bosses from the third-party map packs never move. Though it's kinda hard for them to move around when they're literally just a wall texture.

The final boss of the map pack Plutonia II seemingly rises up from the abyss after you teleport into his arena, but then he just remains stationary for the actual battle afterwards. In fact, looking at the map in a map editor reveals the effect was faked all along by having the arena itself descend down to his level, and thus, he never moves at all.

Stealthy Mook: the Spectres are partially invisible versions of the pink Demons. This ability is not true invisibility (except in dark rooms) but is enough to trip up a player if they're not totally observant.

Stock Sound Effects: Almost everything, from the monster roars to the launch sound of the monster spawn cubes in MAP30, thanks to id licensing sound FX from the Sound Ideas library. This is why all, or nearly all, of the FX used in Doom sound familiar to movie buffs; they've been used in many movies and TV shows, both before Doom and since. In fact, one of the stock sounds is known today as Doom Doors.

Strange Secret Entrance: Some of hidden levels in the series are like this. For example, getting to one secret level required you to blow yourself off a ledge by firing your rocket launcher into a wall at point blank range.

Super Title 64 Advance: Doom 64. It was originally supposed to be called The Absolution, but got its name changed to follow along with the naming convention of other 64 titles. Unfortunately, this led to people mistaking it for yet another port of the original game (like Hexen 64 and Duke Nukem 64 were,) when in fact it is a unique game.

The PlayStation port of Doom has the subtitle "Custom PlayStation Edition".

Surreal Horror: One thing that stays consistent throughout the franchise is that Hell is really Goddamnweird. The laws of physics as seen in our reality don't seem to apply most of the time, and the areas you're fighting through can suddenly shift into another shape entirely. Not to mention some of the surfaces being made of spinal columns and human faces.

Symbol Swearing: Doomguy's reaction upon finding the Unmaker in Doom 64: "What the !@#%* is this!"

Take That!: In "Grosse", four copies of the titular hero of Commander Keen are hung by a noose, with the player encouraged to shoot them to get to the end of the level. John Romero stated that Adrian Carmack, who had worked on Commander Keen, hated the games and the character, and this was his way of getting even.

Tank Controls: The default setting for the PlayStation and Saturn versions of Doom and Doom 64. You can change the controls in the PlayStation and Saturn versions although the customization is not as extensive as Doom 64.

Tele-Frag: Just like "frag", it was also first coined in Doom multiplayer matches. Some Doom levels allow you to telefrag monsters (e.g., E4M2 in Ultimate Doom). Doom II's final boss can also telefrag you if its monster-spawning projectile makes its impact right where you're standing.

"Last Call" (MAP30 of TNT: Evilution) has a second Player 1 start in a sealed-off area — and most of the islands in the lake between the start and the main part of the level have teleport linedefs which take you to this area, so if you don't take exactly the right route across the lake, you telefrag yourself.

Telefrags also ignore whether the telefragged is invulnerable or not and just outright splats them. To be exact, "invulnerable" (whether by Power-Up or by God Mode cheat) means "immune to attacks scoring 1000 Hit Points or less of damage", but a telefrag does 10,000 HP damage.

Teleporting Keycard Squad: More often than not, you can expect to find a horde of demons swarming upon you when you pick up a keycard.

There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The "Russian Overkill" mod adds dozens of ludicrously-overpowered weapons (and some that are not quite so overpowered but are either funny, clever, or just plain bizarre) that effectively remove any challenge the game ever had. At least one weapon's alternate-fire mode can one-shot a Cyberdemon. To say that some of these guns can wipe out an entire level's monster population with a single round is, in many cases, barely an exaggeration.

This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Normally the Partial Invisibility powerup is a detriment, as the erratic randomised firing it causes in enemies makes their projectiles a lot more difficult to dodge as you can no longer anticipate where they fire. Against enemies with hitscan attacks however, as you can't dodge their attacks to begin with, the erratic firing will cause them to miss you a lot more often and save you from a lot of otherwise unavoidable damage. As such, when against a large amount of hitscanners, especially Chaingunners, Partial Invisibility becomes immensely useful.

Title Drop: Doom 64 has a sort-of example, with the final map being named after the original title for the game: The Absolution.

Trope Codifier: For the FPS genre. For years, all FPS games were known as "Doom clones".

The rude, manly space marine has become ubiquitous since then.

The "crate maze", as first seen in E2M2: Containment Area, has also become an FPS cliché. It originated as a good way to have a large area without overtaxing the engine.

Unbroken First-Person Perspective: As with other classic shooters like Wolfenstein 3D, this game pre-dates the tendency to break up gameplay with cutscenes, so the entire game is from Doomguy's perspective. The only things that could be considered breaks in perspective are text screens appearing at the end of each episode, which are narrated to the player in Second-Person Narration.

"Untitled" Title: The level "Hell Keep" (E3M1) has the music track "Untitled", possibly because "MIDI Version of Mouth for War" was too cumbersome and litigation-prone.

E2M4: In version 1.1, approaching the yellow key, retreating to a different room, and returning causes the crushing ceiling to be permanently lowered and sometimes blocking access to the key. That version forgot the original ceiling height whenever the crusher stopped.

"Dead Simple" from Doom II: The central stair raises once you kill all Arachnotrons. If played on Nightmare, Arachnotrons can respawn and be killed off again, allowing you to raise the central stairs out of reach.

"Pharaoh", the first secret level from TNT: Evilution, is Unwinnable in single-player mode, but not co-op mode. This is due to the yellow key being marked as "multiplayer-only". (But you can still complete it using straferunning, an engine bug.)

An official patch from TeamTNT was made available to fix this bug as well as a node-building error that would prevent 100% Kills. It wasn't until the GOG.com release of Final Doom, however, that this patch was integrated into a widely-released version of Evilution.

"Even Simpler" from Doom 64 is basically a remake of "Dead Simple," only with Pain Elementals thrown in. You have to kill every enemy, including the Lost Souls they shoot out, to advance. If they're killed next to some walls, however, the Souls they are supposed to shoot out get sucked into the walls, making it impossible to kill them.

Updated Re-release: Ultimate Doom added no new monsters or weapons (not even the new ones added in Doom II), but a new episode to the original game. It was basically an excuse to get Doom (formerly distributed as shareware) sold in retail stores.

The Xbox LIVE Arcade version of Ultimate Doom and Doom II has updated graphics and music, and online multiplayer. These treatments were also added for PlayStation Network's Doom Classic Complete compilation.

Violation of Common Sense: You'd have to be crazy in order to take on and kill a Cyberdemon with nothing but your fists. Yet that's exactly what you have to do to get the "You Have Huge Guts" achievement in the XBLA release of Doom II, and the "Knuckle Sammich" achievement in the PS3 collection. At the very least, you can soften him up first.

The Walls Have Eyes: Some wall sprites have moving walls of faces staring at you, and in later episodes/levels of Doom the switches are now stone heads whose eyes glow when you hit them on. Other switches are just eyes protruding out of fleshy patches, closing when activated.

The War Sequence: Custom levels pitting the player against massive hordes of enemies (called "slaughter maps") are somewhat popular amongst the Doom community, the official Doom levels have a couple of their own as well, the most infamous being Go 2 It from Final Doom, which is a remixed version of the first stage from Doom II with over 200 enemies, including 19 Arch-Viles and 13 Cyberdemons (fortunately, you don't have to fight them all at the same time; unfortunately, you do have to fight up to 4 at a time.)

Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Doom and Doom 64 take place on Mars' moons. Simple to understand. Doom II takes place on Earth, but it is never specified what part of Earth the game is set in, nor are there any major locations given (other than a spaceport and Doomguy's hometown) to indicate that Doomguy is anywhere other than some random UAC base.

With This Herring: Hand waved in the first couple of Doom games, where you initially do battle with the legions of Hell while carrying a single pistol. This is explained by the Excuse Plot saying that you were a sentry stationed outside the base while everyone else went in. Naturally, all those people with the huge guns got killed and you're the only one left. This does not come off as being particularly convincing.

Brutal Doom replaces the pistol with an assault rifle which remains useful for the whole game.

In the Doom clone Fortress of Dr. Radiaki, you start as a top-notch agent sent to investigate mysterious island... with a pistol and a goddamn baseball bat. Underfinancing, indeed.

You Keep Using That Word: Doom started the FPS trend of misusing the word "chaingun" to refer to rotary guns; a chaingun is actually a single-barrel weapon which operates its bolt with an electrically-driven chain.

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